Traditional redundancy protection schemes in telecommunications systems provide a subset of standby or inactive resources for a subset of active resources. A common redundancy protection scheme is a 1:1 scheme where there is one standby resource for every active resource. In these systems, only the active resources are used to process or provide services to communication sessions. In a media gateway or another device coupled to an IP (Internet Protocol) network, a 1:1 redundancy protection scheme is often used to employ one active network interface card or resource and a standby network interface card or resource. These network interface cards couples the media gateway to the IP network, but only the active network interface card is carrying traffic. Although the active and standby network interface cards each has a unique hardware address, they share the same IP address. Because both the active network interface have its pathway to the IP network as well as a redundant pathway, it become desirable to be able to detect and recover from failures on the redundant pathway so that no data or voice traffic is lost.